Tomatometer®

Audience

In The Outsiders, the director's class is consistently present, but it may be a case of the wrong man for the job, since overall film plays unevenly, with a cliche and detached ambiance that robs the plotline of what passion it might've whipped up.

Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

One of the most overtly aesthetic, art-for-art's-sake films in Hollywood's history, a faux-naf Pre-Raphaelite mural in which angels with dirty faces but immaculately pure hearts burn with a hard, gemlike flame before being snuffed out in their prime.

Antagony & Ecstasy

10/25/2014 by Tim Brayton

A satisfying example of the artist-as-talented-hack.

The Film Yap

5/5/2013 by Nick Rogers

Ultimately, "The Outsiders" feels like two movies awkwardly thrown together - one a tough-acting antiseptic to the sanitized-suburbia Spielberg fantasies that ruled the era's box office, the other a besotted valentine to widescreen epics of old.